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[...] while Saussure made most of his basic assumptions against the background of rationalism, Peirce's pragmatism and semiotics emphatically denies such a background while Saussure was largely preoccupied with describing natural language as a self-contained system of differences between linguistic signs. Peirce's semiotics made much wider ontological claims while Saussure's theory was rooted in associationistic psychology. Peirce tried to do his best to denounce psychologism (Deledalle 2000: 100-113); while in Saussure's Course the constitutive law of meaning has no importance for the "practical Self," Peirce puts decisive emphasis on conceivable practical results (Colapietro 1991; Broden 2000: 27-89). (Kiryushchenko 2012: 256)

And yet we know very little about associationistic psychology (presumably, a movement in German psychology at the end of the 19th century, focused on such phenomena as sensory discrimination and association).

Obviously, in Peirce's case, like in Propp's, the idea of classification thus described is closely related with the idea of a process of continuous mediation that culminates in the formation of a general rule, and as such is just one of many steps to the concept of continuity that Peirce in his late writings represented as "relational generality" (Cf. CP 6.172, 6.190; Peirce 1992: 181-196). A still earlier germ of this same synechistic concept was presented by Peirce in his "ON a New List of Categories." It is in this paper that Peirce introduced the term "interpretant," an intermediate concept that was to play in his own "List" the role the notion "I think" played in Kantian deduction of the pure concepts of understanding - the role of the foundation for bringing a multitude of experience to conceptual unity. And it is in this paper that Peirce, by introducing this term, offered an alternative, non-Hegelian synechistic interpretation of Kantian synthesis of the manifold types of intuition; here he represented the synthesis not as a pure self-positing but as an act of continuous development addressed to possible future (Cf. W2: 49-58; KRV: B 133). (Kiryushchenko 2012: 259)

I recently explained the interpretant to a non-semiotician as that which connects the representamen (sign-manifestation) and object (the content that the sign makes manifest). I was not too far off.

Taking the story of Oedipus Rex by Sophocles as an example. Propp names several such narrative functions: "Prophesy," parental marriage," "escape," "nurturing," "particide," "sphinx," etc., each one being subject to a similar analysis. But, unlike other formalists, instead of simply presenting these narrative functions as ahistorical structural components shaping the plot, in the course of his analysis Propp, against expectations, begins to explicate them step-by-step as specific iconic units of discourse by means of which certain larger forms of narrative are transmitted from one historical period to another. In other words, instead of routinely describing the way mutual arrangement of distinct discursive elements endows the story with meaning; that is, instead of describing a pure ahistoric narrative structure, he uses the Oedipus example to show how folklore discourse exists in time. (Kiryushchenko 2012: 260-261)

For some reason I feel similarly about my study of the literary descriptions of nonverbal behaviour.

So, at first sight, the prophesy motive appears to play no constitutive part in the story. Nevertheless, it turns out that if a prophecy of precisely this kind should be excluded from the story, the plot would literally fall apart, since nearly all the meaningful events would be rendered incomprehensible, consecutive parts of the plot would become disconnected from one another, and the behavior of characters would seem totally unmotivated. If we excluded what the oracle says to Laius, we would simply not be able to understand why this or that character does what he or she does. For a formalist, to solve this problem is to tell why this motivational structure occupies the exact position in the plot that it does. (Kiryushchenko 2012: 162)

It Shpet's definition, we have a struture (and not a system) at our hands.

The sum total of all motives performing the same function that the prophecy itself performs in the story could then be called an interpretant, as it embraces a network of mediating links that provide an understanding of the story as a whole. That is, without introducing any significant changes to the plot, it directly reduces the manifold of actions, facts ad events to a unity (cf. W2: 54). Moreover, it does so by leaving certain unsaturated links as a possibility of further interpretations in another discursive system that would make the initial symbol grow still further (see figure 2). (Kiryushchenko 2012: 264)

I am reminded of Lotman's similar attempt to identify the interpretant with the "function".

This intermediate structure Kant calls the "transcendental scheme," which (and this, without question, is the ssum and substance of the second version of the first Critique) is always a product of imagination, or something that, as Peirce later puts it in his pramatic maxim, we "conceive" to be such and such. It is neither a percept, nor a concept, but something that interprets the former into the latter (Cf. one of Peirce's definitions in the beinning of MS 212 "On Representations": "A representation is an object which stands for another so that an experience of the former affords us a knowledge of the latter"; W3: 62). (Kiryushchenko 2012: 266)

Real understanding of any scientific subject must include some knowledge of its historical growth; we cannot comprehend and accept modern concepts and theories without knowing something of their origins - of how we have got where we are. Neglect of this maxim can lead to that unfortunate state of mind which regard the science of the day as finality. (Cherry 1977: 32)We should temper reading by writing, and reciprocally, so that the written composition gives body (corpus) to what has been obtained by reading. Reading collects orationes logoi (discourses, elements of discourse); we must make a corpus of them. (Foucault 2005: 359)The existence of the inner book, along with unreading or forgetting, is what
makes the way we discuss books so discontinuous and heterogeneous. What we take to be the books we have read is in fact an anomalous accumulation of fragments of texts, reworked by our imagination and unrelated to the books of others, even if these books are materially identical to ones we have held in our hands. (Bayard 2007: 85-86)The post-Cubist function of quotations in collages emerges with particular clarity in the early notes of Eisenstein, who wrote in 1928 that "an entire treatise can be made by composition of quotations." In his later works, in which compositions of quotations are often used, he himself explains them (in the spirit of the "linear style" of quotations) by a desire for "minimal distortion." (Ivanov 1976b: 323)A person may be interested in scientific statements for their own sake (interested in collecting them as a person may be interested in collecting butterflies); a person may have knowledge and the increase of knowledge as his goal. (Morris 1949: 128)In non-literate society, of course, there are usually some individuals whose interests lead them to collect, analyse and interpret the cultural tradition in a personal way [but] it is still evident that the literate individual has in practice so large a field of personal selection from the total cultural repertoire that the odds are strongly against his experiencing the cultural tradition as any sort of patterned whole. (Goody & Watt 1963: 335)A different language is too often taken for stammering, a nonconformist virtuosity is misinterpreted as formlessness, exquisite variability is confused with cruelty, intentional enigmatic indefiniteness is deplored as the disappointing obscurity or fragmentariness of a mere neglected sketch, and in the stupendous interplay of symmetry and disequilibrium onesided critics are prone to overlook the harmony and to observe nothing but chaos. (Jakobson 1981[1967b]: 498)I am convinced that there must still be a number of other concepts or models of potentially systemic generality scattered in some (un)fairly unknown works of disappeared or living researchers. We should dive for them in the deeps of literature. (François 1999: 217)